There's always an idiot side to anything. On the other side, you have the Free & Open Source Computer, of course. This is not quite home for the Mighty Penguins Tamers Club as you would probably have guessed.

Thursday, February 08, 2007

I did some banners yesterday to advertise our organisation on the web, using The Gimp. Lately, I had a short argument about Win vs Linux, where I stand to the point that Linux is good enough as long as you can do everything you need with it

Isn't that true ? Look at your needs, and then define what you buy/use/promote. If I am not wrong, unless you are desperately a fashion victim, that's the way we do in every other field, buy things, when we can afford them, depending on usage of it. Err, OK, mostly or hopefully, I agree.

So, if that's the way you buy a book, a car, rent a house, shop for food, why not applying the same to software? This Linux box of mine, SuSE93, does it all. Almost:

On the Pro Front:-No equivalent to Adobe Premiere, so can't edit our promotional DVD's, but given my processor age, it's an issue I can't really address,-Haven't found yet Animated GIF soft, but sure it should exists somewhere.

On the Leisure Activity side:-No Easy 3D modelling tool. several available, all a nightmare to use if you are not Milkshape/StudioMAX specialist,-Not the latest in 3D games, but plenty of them anyway.

Out of this scope, I can't see anything missing: kmail is the best-ever email client I worked with, OPERA & FIRFOX are great web browsers, OpenOffice does the job pretty well if you have not too much of charts in it. Only the equivalent to PowerPoint is under-average in terms of compatibility, but not to the point I can't send presentations to colleagues.

So far, so good: there is actually a lot of different choices out there (where I would not actually recommend anyone going for an OS/2 install).

One small point: it's free. Looking at all I got in my box & in the laptop - what a value here, without license expiration, shareware online payments, secret codes not to loose after install.

And one, main point, that makes the full difference: If you need a soft, you'd usually google it, right ? browse through 1 thousand vendors site, try to find a demo, download & try, get expired, re-install, run into compatibility issues and so on... Given the very nature of Open Source, you don't do that with Linux: You got this "repertoire" of available softs tailor-made for your flavor of Linux, choose them using keywordsearch, the soft then checks compatibility & missing items that are needed; Click start & you got it! Currently, UBUNTU has 17.000+ softs available, not somewhere on the net, not by outside vendors, no, just trough a simple interface which allow you to browse & select!

That Soft-at-hand feature, and the Multiple Virtual Desktops, makes me an addict.